Serious SharePoint

By default, SharePoint allows for documents up to 50 MB to be uploaded to a site.  Any larger than that size and an error is thrown.  The maximum upload size is scoped at the web application level, so changes made to the upload size limit will affect all site collections for that web application.  To change the maximum upload size:

• Browse to your Central Administration page
• Click Application Management tab
• Under SharePoint Web Application Management select Web Application General Settings
• On the Maximum Upload Size row modify the upload cap in megabytes
• Click OK when complete

So that should be it, right?  In many cases it will be.  However,  you will encounter the situations where you are still receiving an error that the file size is too large even after modifying the Maximum Upload Size for the web application.  This message is being caused by IIS, not SharePoint, and needs to be resolved by editing the Web.Config to reflect the new file size restrictions.  To modify the Web.Config and increase the Maximum Upload Size:

• Browse to the web application’s home directory (On the server a default directory is c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<Website Directory>\)
• Backup the web.config file
• Edit the original web.config file with NotePad or other editor
  • NOTE: Do NOT use WordPad, it will corrupt your web.config file
• Find the line: <httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”51200″ /> and replace 51200 with (<New Limit In MB> * 1024)
  • For example, to increase the limit to 100 MB we would see <httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”102400″ />
• Save the web.config file and perform an IISRESET for the changed file to take effect

Read the rest of this entry »

While crawling your content sources you may see a large number of warnings and errors appear.  The warning most commonly seen is “The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled.”  Fear not, this does not mean the file was skipped by the indexer.  What it does mean is that only the first 16 megabytes of data (by default) was read and indexed.  In content stores containing large documents, this error can occur thousands and thousands of times.  To resolve this warning you need to  increase the maximum amount of data crawled per document.  Be forewarned that you will likely need to increase the crawler timeout to allow for the additional data. Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time you will have the need to run scripts or executables repeatedly during the day.  Luckily Windows Server 2003 makes this easy with Scheduled Tasks.  To create a scheduled task:

• Click Start->Control Panel->Scheduled Tasks
• Select “Create a New Task” to run the scheduling wizard
• To schedule tasks to run at smaller intervals during the day, select “Advanced” when at the date and time selection screen

While this should always work in theory, there are times when an advanced scheduled task appears to run but does not.  The last run time does not update but the status column shows no error.  To workaround this scenario you can setup the scheduled task via the command prompt, specifically with use of the Schtasks.exe application.  For further information, refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814596.

As the documentation below indicates, you can create a scheduled task from the command line without encountering the issue discussed previously.  For example: to create a scheduled task on server WSSDev that runs c:\test.bat every 5 minutes without end we would use the command schtasks.exe /create /tn TestScheduledTask /tr c:\test.bat /sc minute /mo 5 /s WSSDev /u WSSDev\<account> /p <password>.

Note that if you are creating this scheduled tasks locally on the server, you might get an error about passing the user credentials to the server or system.  You can work around this error by using /s localhost in place of /s <servername>.  For example, the above command would look like: schtasks.exe /create /tn TestScheduledTask /tr c:\test.bat /sc minute /mo 5 /s localhost /u WSSDev\<account> /p <password>.

Read the rest of this entry »